Baidu
Beijing-based company that began as a search engine business and develops the ERNIE model family.
| Model | Released | Weights | Hosts | Cheapest host | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ERNIE 4.5 21B A3B | Jun 2025 | — | 1 | Novita AI | $0.07 | $0.28 |
| ERNIE 4.5 VL 424B A47B | Jun 2025 | — | 1 | Novita AI | $0.42 | $1.25 |
2 of 2 models · prices per million tokens at the cheapest host, read Oct 23, 09:51 UTC
About Baidu
Baidu was founded in January 2000 by Robin Yanhong Li and Eric Yong Xu and began as a search engine business.1, 4
Li, a former Infoseek engineer, is chairman and chief executive officer as of March 2026.1, 4
The company states its mission as making the complicated world simpler through technology.1, 9
Baidu researchers introduced the first ERNIE model, a language representation model, in a paper submitted to arXiv in April 2019.2, 3
ERNIE Bot, a conversational bot powered by the in-house ERNIE foundation model, launched in the first quarter of 2023, followed by ERNIE 3.5 in May 2023 and ERNIE 4.0 in October 2023.1
ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 were released in March 2025.1
In June 2025 Baidu open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 series under the Apache 2.0 licence.1, 5, 6
ERNIE 5.0, a natively omni-modal model that the ERNIE blog describes as having 2.4 trillion parameters, arrived in November 2025 and was updated in January 2026.1, 10
ERNIE 5.1 followed on 9 May 2026.11
The ERNIE API runs on Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform, operated by a Beijing company whose privacy policy says personal information collected in mainland China is in principle stored there.7, 8
Official links
- Website baidu.com
- API docs cloud.baidu.com/doc/qianfan/index.html
- Pricing cloud.baidu.com/doc/qianfan/s/wmh4sv6ya
- GitHub github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE
- Hugging Face huggingface.co/baidu
- Blog ernie.baidu.com/blog
Sources
- Form 20-F · sec.gov · read Oct 23
- [1904.09223] ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration · arxiv.org · read Oct 23
- ERNIE: Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration · arxiv.org · read Oct 23
- 424B4 · sec.gov · read Oct 23
- GitHub - PaddlePaddle/ERNIE: The official repository for ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIEKit – its industrial-grade development toolkit based on PaddlePaddle. · GitHub · github.com · read Oct 23
- Announcing the Open Source Release of the ERNIE 4.5 Model Family | ERNIE Blog · ernie.baidu.com · read Oct 23
- 百度千帆·大模型服务及Agent开发平台 -百度智能云 · cloud.baidu.com · read Oct 23
- 隐私政策 - 协议 | 百度智能云文档 · cloud.baidu.com · read Oct 23
- Company Overview | Baidu Inc · ir.baidu.com · read Oct 23
- ERNIE 5.0: A 2.4 Trillion-Parameter Unified Multimodal Foundation Model | ERNIE Blog · ernie.baidu.com · read Oct 23
- ERNIE 5.1 Officially Released! Topping Multiple Leaderboards — A Model That Writes Better and Understands You More | ERNIE Blog · ernie.baidu.com · read Oct 23
Every fact above links to its source and the date it was read; last checked Oct 23. Not affiliated with Baidu. Corrections or removal on request: contact.